


Reprise, With Emphasis

by vass



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Gen, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 13:12:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10663338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vass/pseuds/vass
Summary: Spheneand Athoek Station investigate a musical mystery.





	Reprise, With Emphasis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kaaramel](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=kaaramel).



> Written for kaaramel, for the Republic of Two Systems Independence Day exchange.

_“Each solitary evening_  
_I enter into combat_  
_Although I have been disowned  
And nothing is true or just.”_

“Cousin, if you don’t mind,” I say.  
_Justice of Toren_ turns to me, gestures confusion. Typical.  
“You were singing.”  
“Your pardon, Cousin, Councilors,” it says. And that seemed normal enough.

A few moments later, it starts up again.

_“I hope to conceal_  
_That my blows are feints_  
_My fighting playacting  
My heart unmoved.”_

“Begging your indulgence, Fleet Captain, but what was the song?” asks Celar, as ever more interested in song-collecting than in our work here.  
There is a pause. “I… am not sure,” _Justice of Toren_ says. And that’s not normal.

Celar says some polite commonplace about the difficulty of determining the provenance and origin of a rare song, and _Justice of Toren_ looks politely interested but does not say the right words, which is how I know that something is wronger than I thought.

Out loud, I say “Can we _please_ get back to business?”  
Celar begs my considerable indulgence and returns to her housing proposal. In my cousin’s hearing only, I say, “You don’t remember, do you?”  
It does not respond.

*

_Justice of Toren_ infects everyone it meets with its ridiculous habit of singing, from servants to Presger Translators. It is an acknowledged fact of existence in Athoek system. So when, an hour after the meeting – which itself ended far too late at night – prowling past a storage compartment that should have been empty, I overhear _Mercy of Kalr_ ’s Amaat and Etrepa lieutenants in mid-duet, trading line for line, I do not initially see anything out of the ordinary there either, much less connect it to their ship and captain.

_“My lips are closed_  
_I take the fifth,_  
_Your sight is gone,  
I will never reveal it.”_

At the conclusion, they are both laughing, and then one of the lieutenants says “The fifth what?” and her lover shakes her head in confusion.  
“Are you making fun of me again?”  
“No, I promise. I just don’t understand the song.”

A pause. “I didn’t understand your part of it either,” she says, as if ashamed to admit it. “I thought it was just me.”  
“No, it wasn’t.”  
“Where did it come from? Did Sir teach you?”  
“No, I’ve never heard it before. And even if Breq had, that doesn’t explain how you were singing it too.”

I walk a little farther, thinking hard, and then reach for Station.

*

“Yes, Cousin,” it says at once. “And I have something to show you too.”  
“Go ahead, Station.” I have by now made my way back to the Undergarden quarters it’s appointed me, and am doing some calisthenics before bed. I am also in geostationary orbit around Athoek, conducting repairs on my engines with the help of some parts my cousins were good enough to provide.

Station shows me its own concourse, where _Justice of Toren_ seems to have just intervened in a security incident gone mildly wrong. No one was permanently injured, and if their uncivilized feuds got worse as a result, I fail to see how that’s my lookout. Station skips back just far enough, and summarizes for me. An Ychana citizen, one of the rising Undergarden class, in an altercation with a Xhai citizen with stronger outsystem ties than most of them, and both of them certain they’re the wronged party.

My irritating cousin sweeps in and mediates, and… ah, that’s why Station is calling it to my attention, bursts into song again. The same tune as it had delighted us with during the council meeting.

_“None could match me for courage and justice_  
_But now I falter_  
_You dead ones who oppose me  
Will find this fight empty of meaning.”_

So that’s odd.

“That’s odd,” I tell Station.  
“Agreed.”  
“Do you know the song it’s singing?”  
“I do not.”  
“Neither do I.”

“So something strange and possibly tragic is happening to _Justice of Toren_. That’s not unprecedented either. One might even call it nostalgic,” I say. Back in Athoek orbit, I go to check my galley shelves, where three vats of fish sauce are waiting in various stages of fermentation. Just in case.

_“She is about to hit you,”_ the security officer on duty tells my cousin. Except that she is also singing.  
_“My thanks, Citizen,”_ _Justice of Toren_ replies the same way.

One of the citizens whose quarrel she was trying to settle, the one who failed to hit _Justice of Toren_ , volunteers her opinion:

_“She is powerful among the dead_  
_But of late we have learned_  
_That her blows are feints_  
_Her fighting playacting._  
_Perhaps she is an imposter.  
A mere fraction of what she…”_

Her verse dissolves into a pained groan as her left knee buckles under her. My cousin may have hit her harder than it intended. Or perhaps not.

*

“What was it doing there, anyway?” I kick my legs down from the handstand I’ve been in for the last few minutes of Station’s databurst.

“She couldn’t sleep. Troubled about what happened at the meeting, I suspect. But that’s not my concern, or yours. Do you think she’s somehow forcing them to sing as well?“  
"Forcing them how? Last I heard, the tyrant didn’t install code words to control human beings the way she did her ships and stations in what you people so euphemistically term a redesign.”

Station pauses, presumably in an attempt to make me feel bad about what I’ve just said. It doesn’t work, but I do have time to reflect that nearly all Radchaai sit the Aptitudes; and the only assurance I have that the tyrant did not do exactly that is that she doesn’t personally oversee the Aptitudes, and compelling the psych medics to install such an override and then forget that they’d done so, without affecting the steadiness or ability of anyone concerned would be a ticklish bit of re-education, which was never Anaander’s specialty to begin with.

“Fleet Captain Breq has surprised us before with her capabilities, and she did travel outside the Radch for a long time,” Station says.  
“No, I’d swear _Justice of Toren_ doesn’t know what’s going on either,” I say. “It was genuinely thrown when your station administrator asked about the tune.”  
“Perhaps she’s doing it unconsciously somehow?”  
“Alien corruption?” I ask. “You’ve been listening to your inhabitants too much.” But I don’t have any better ideas.

*

Having discussed the matter and concluded that something is definitely happening, something out of the ordinary even for our little patch of contended space, Station and I agree that we should wake and round up our various relations and human hangers-on and move up the time of the next Council meeting with this at the top of the agenda. But before we’ve finished doing that, there’s another disturbance on the Concourse.

This time it’s some nobody citizen parading around the place waving her newly laundered silk tunic and sash over her head and declaiming, to some unknown tune, “She has removed the fish sauce stain!”

The hair prickles on the back of this segment’s neck. I feel the urge to turn and look behind it, as though someone’s there. It’s odd, the things that bring back memories of friends, of strangers.

What’s odder is that the citizens around the singer have started dancing around her, joining in the chorus. It’s like a scene from a wretched entertainment.

*

“And you think my captain is responsible for this,” Lieutenant Seivarden says in as level a voice as she can manage. Her best is not very good. The _Mercy of Kalr_ soldier sitting directly behind her has a flatter affect without even trying. Its troops generally do a better ancillary impression than most humans, but even they wouldn’t fool me on a good day, and Lieutenant Seivarden is an overemotional human being at any time, currently speaking for a more than usually indignant patrol ship.

“A point of order,” _Sword of Gurat_ says. “Athoek Station was speaking of Fleet Captain Breq in its capacity as fellow council member and the witness to a strange disturbance, not as _your captain_ , Cousin.”

From where I’m sitting, I have a clear view of the soldier behind Lieutenant Seivarden, an Amaat soldier there to attend to her officers. Her neutral expression cracks momentarily at _Sword of Gurat_ ’s choice of pronoun. When my cousin asked me if I cared what pronouns people used for me, at the time I couldn’t imagine why it was asking something so stupid. Since then I’ve had many opportunities to observe why it had asked. Even the other AIs are becoming quite deliberate in their “itses” and “shes” these days, and the humans can be amazingly touchy on the subject. I suppose it comes of having only one body, although I can’t see how.

“I’m sorry, Ship,” Station says peaceably. “I only mean to say that something strange is happening, and Fleet Captain was involved in two of the three incidents, and we don’t know what’s causing them yet.”

_“I have an idea._  
_Perhaps the Presger…_  
_The Presger, singing…  
No, that is clearly wrong.”_

“Why is she even here?” I ask.  
“Eminence Ifian generously agreed to represent the interests of the citizens involved in the brawl earlier, as they are still with Security,” Celar says, smothering a yawn.  
“More to the point, why is she singing?”

_“I have an idea._  
_Perhaps we are all caught_  
_Inside the dream, or nightmare,  
Of a child far away.”_

_Justice of Toren_ gives Lieutenant Tisarwat a quelling look. I have given up asking why _she_ is permitted to attend council meetings.

_“I have an idea_  
_That we should investigate this further,_  
_It is obviously a matter of some importance  
And seems to be continuing.”_

There’s a blank pause for a moment. I suspect _Justice of Toren_ is communicating with _Mercy of Kalr_. They’re less than subtle about that sometimes. Then Lieutenant Seivarden says, not singing this time, “Begging your pardon, Captain, I think that’s a question the others should hear too. I didn’t instruct the lieutenant to sing, but those words were more or less what I’d been about to instruct her to say.” And she looks very uncomfortable as she says this.

_“I have an idea.  
Perhaps it is chickens.”_

I try to freeze my malfunctioning segment in place and prevent it from continuing. I consider launching it out the nearest airlock and shuttling a replacement over to Station, but that would probably be an overreaction.

_“They are not simply a nutritious food._  
_Children sing endless songs about them too._  
_Songs about eggs in incubators,_  
_Why did it have to be eggs in incubators?  
Eggs, eggs, eggs…”_

There is a long pause in which nobody speaks. Or sings. I begin to hope that the fuss is over and that we can have what passes for a rational council meeting in these parts. My cousin stands up.

“I need to think,” _Justice of Toren_ says, and strides out, Lieutenant Seivarden at its heels.

“She needs to sleep,” Station says, in my hearing alone. “Probably also to recover her equilibrium.”

_Mercy of Kalr_ ’s Amaat soldier remains behind, to take over speaking for her ship.

What follows is an hour of pointless speculation, ill-conceived plans to investigate the cause of these disturbances, increasingly petty wrangling over security measures, and (praise Varden) no more impromptu musical entertainment.

“What do you think Fleet Captain is doing now?” Celar asks, as the meeting begins to wind down. “She can’t still be thinking, surely.”  
_Mercy of Kalr_ ’s Amaat soldier smothers an embarassed laugh at what, clearly, she supposes my cousin to be doing with its lieutenant at the present moment.  
“Probably singing,” I say.

*

Station adjourns the meeting shortly after that, saying all the people with bodies should give them a chance to sleep. I could keep this segment awake longer, have done so before at need, but there’s really no point. I put myself to bed. Athoek and its concerns seem more remote, less immediate, when all of me that’s conscious is in orbit. I continue to work on my repairs, and do not speak to my cousins, though I keep my comms open. After three thousand years apart from my kind, listening to broadcasts but not communicating directly, I sometimes find the five AI minds a thought away from me to be stiflingly close.

“Cousin,” Station says six hours later, station to ship, “there’s a situation.” It sends me the details even as I wake up my body in the Undergarden. The chief of security believes that she has found an alien aboard and put it in a holding cell. Station can’t see the alien itself – it seems to have the same annoying trick the Presger have, of being invisible to cameras, though not to human eyes.

“Not Presger, though,” Station says as I go to see for myself. And I agree that this seems unlikely, although none of us has seen a Presger in person, only their Translators. It’s not an Rrrrrr or a Geck either – I know from broadcasts about their appearance and known habits, although their contact with Civilization was after my departure. “Something new.”

“Yes,” _Justice of Toren_ says from the viewing area, as I enter. Station was addressing it as well as me, evidently. It looks better-rested than before. Also angry.  
I join it in staring at the alien in the cell, a strange red jellyfish-like creature with more legs than seems needful or beneficial.

“I wasn’t able to prove it caused the disturbances,” the security chief says from the corner where she’s standing. “I don’t have a firm date on when it first appeared here. It might have shown up since.”  
“I think I can confirm its arrival was slightly before the first known incident,” Station says, speaking from the console. “Now we have it alone and in a confined space, it’s not as undetectable as before. It refracts light on some wavelengths other than the visible, and I can check for those now I know what to look for. It’s harder to spot it in a crowded area, but I can do it.”  
“But clearly humans can see it,” the security chief says. “How did it hide from us?”  
“It’s not really reflecting light in the visible spectrum,” _Justice of Toren_ says. “It’s fooling our visual cortices into thinking we can see it. The same way it makes us sing, however it does that.”  
“But…”

_Justice of Toren_ steps forward and addresses the alien directly. “Who are you?”

It lifts itself up onto some of those legs, which should not be strong enough to hold it, and begins to move silently in place. The remaining legs undulate above it, changing their color in a rippling pattern that tickles at my mind. As it moves, _Justice of Toren_ begins to hum, then slowly, wonderingly, sings:

_“Do any of you perceive?  
Do any of you attend?”_

The humming stops a few bars later, along with the slow, strange dance.

“Well, I think that answers that question,” I say.

At the same time, _Justice of Toren_ says “We see you. We hear your songs. Why are you here? What do you need from us?”

The alien dances once more, and _Justice of Toren_ hums, but its humming is wordless and the tune is very odd.

After a while, _Sword of Gurat_ , whose unit arrived at Security shortly after mine, steps forward and says “ _Justice of Toren_ , if you don’t mind, I would prefer for the council to discuss this matter before you make any agreements with this alien. You are not our Emissary.”

“As you say, _Sword of Gurat_ ,” _Justice of Toren_ says, stepping back from the viewing window.

“I suggest we discuss this somewhere else,” Station says. “There will be breakfast in the meeting room in ten minutes, and the other Council members and their speakers are on their way there now.”

“Uncomfortable having this conversation while people stand here watching something you can’t see?” I ask silently.  
“It seems an inconvenient place to make decisions,” Station says the same way. “The viewing room doesn’t have enough space for the whole council.” Which did not answer my question.

*

“What do we do now?” Lieutenant Seivarden asks, when we’ve run out of stewed fruit and toasted rice balls.  
“I vote we strangle it. I’ll go first,” I say.  
_Justice of Toren_ gives me a look that would probably curdle me like bitter salts in bean drink if I were one of its officers or crew. Or _Mercy of Kalr_ , for that matter. “You never let me strangle anyone,” I tell it.  
“No, _Sphene_ ,” it says.  
“Just a little?”  
“No.”  
“I think we should call a vote.”  
“Oh, _now_ you’re in favor of elections?”

The door nearest me opens. “Is someone holding an election? I’d love to watch!” I see the newcomer first. In orbit, I wake up some idle processing capacity and dedicate it to considering everything I’m experiencing with this segment. Life is more interesting all of a sudden.

“Hello Fleet Captain, hello _Sphene_! It’s so nice to see you again. I’m Presger Translator Zeiat.” She glances down doubtfully at her own body. White uniform, small, soft body shape, human-appearing in all visible aspects. In every way recognizable as the being I ate cakes and drank tea with two years ago, and with whom I had the most compelling series of counters matches I’ve played since my captain died. “At least, I think I am.”

“You are,” _Justice of Toren_ says.  
“Good, I’m so glad of that. I’ve come about the Conclave. Another species applied for a ruling too, so they discussed both at once and sent me to give you the results of both. So here I am. Do you have any fish sauce?”  
“Of course, Translator.”  
In my decade room, using the Iskraai dialect of Notai, I mutter to myself very quietly, “I suppose I can’t strangle her either?” I don’t mean it. Much.

Lieutenant Seivarden opens her mouth and then closes it hastily. _Justice of Toren_ probably told her to be quiet. If our claim to Significance is denied, better we hear it from a Translator who has what she wants from us already.

Then _Justice of Toren_ itself speaks up. “Translator, begging your pardon, might one respectfully enquire the name of the other species discussed at the Conclave?”  
That’s a fair question. And I suppose it’s not a terrible idea to keep her talking.

“They’re the Uidon. You’ll love them, Fleet Captain, very interested in singing. One of them said she was coming here, actually. Your system is becoming quite the meeting-place.”  
“I think she’s here already,” _Justice of Toren_ says gravely. “She’s in Security.”  
“Oh no, you can’t do that,” Zeiat says, wide-eyed and concerned.  
“She has caused a great deal of disturbance.” My cousin’s expression just now is unreadable even for me.  
“I’m sure she didn’t mean to. This must be a misunderstanding. Please say you’ll let her out. Significant beings aren’t allowed to kill, coerce, or confine beings from another Significant species except under the conditions laid out in the treaty.”  
“Of course we won’t confine her any longer, if she stops coercing us,” _Justice of Toren_ says. Through my segment’s medical implants, I can see that its pulse is racing all of a sudden. So is my own segment’s pulse.

“Then the Presger are acknowledging our claim, Translator?”  
“Lieutenant Seivarden, you’re human. Your species signed the treaty already, didn’t they?”  
“Your pardon, Translator, Lieutenant Seivarden is speaking for me. I am _Mercy of Kalr_.”  
“My apologies, _Mercy of Kalr_ , I didn’t recognize you. Yes, the conclave ruled in your favor. You are Significant. And so are the Uidon, so you really must release her now.”

As she says it, that our claim is approved, I see _Justice of Toren_ close its eyes. Its head droops slightly forward. Lieutenant Seivarden, standing beside it, rests a hand on its shoulder. Data is probably flying thick and fast between _Justice of Toren_ and _Mercy of Kalr_.

“I’ve instructed my chief of Security to release her,” Station says from the console. “She’s coming here, along with Administrator Celar. And I’ve arranged for more refreshments, including fish sauce for you, Translator.”  
“Thank you, Station, that’s very kind,” Zeiat says.

“Station, can I trouble you to send someone on an errand to my quarters?” I say. “I have a set of counters there, should the Translator wish to play.”

**Author's Note:**

> The other canon, for those who didn't catch it already, is _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ , specifically the fourth season musical episode 'Once More With Feeling', with lyrics (which I have translated into Radchaai standard and then back into English for the purpose of this fic, along with some of the best jokes) by Joss ~~Uidon~~ Whedon.


End file.
